Trend-spotting

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In China, everybody loves Xu Sanduo

January 13, 2008|By Evan Osnos

BEIJING — The Chinese have found an anti-hero worthy of Tony Soprano.

Xu Sanduo is not a godfather. He is not a father. He is not even a lout. He is, however, a character whose mix of flaws and charms has made him an unlikely television phenomenon who seems perfectly crafted for his time. And his story -- violent, exotic, unlike the life of almost anyone watching at home -- has somehow emerged as China's national Rorschach test.

"Soldier Sortie," a dramatic series, premiered on Chinese state television in 2006. In the first episode, viewers meet Xu, the shy, simple son of a peasant. The father complains that the boy is too dim to plant crops. A drunk who spends most of his time smacking around his three sons, the father wants to pawn off the youngest, Xu, on the army, which seems like a singularly unsuitable fit. When the recruiter arrives to take a look, the father thrashes Xu for eating too fast and making a bad impression. Then he orders Xu to show off his physical strength ("Climb a tree!"). The recruiter takes pity on Xu and signs him up just to get him away from the father, proclaiming, "In one year, I'll turn your son into an awe-inspiring soldier."

Sure enough, the country boy blossoms and becomes a special forces star. Much of the series is spent following his training, showing him carry heavy logs and wriggle through the mud. At other moments, he fights valiantly against unnamed foreign foes. The pyrotechnics are impressively lifelike and modern, in contrast to other state-television war dramas that are hung up on the Red Army's victories half a century ago, with brooding Mao Tse-tung look-alikes in pancake makeup and stick-on hair, waxing nobly.

Where Soprano is cruel, Xu's flaw is dimness. But his determination to succeed through hard work seems refreshing in today's China, in which connections and canny strategy seem to guarantee success more often than simple perseverance.

A typical fan is Xu Bo, a 23-year-old college student in the eastern city of Hangzhou, who is facing uncertain job prospects with no clear way to get ahead. "It's not only me," Xu said. "My grandfather, my father, my classmates, we all love it. I watched it two or three times and cried over and over."

The Chinese search engine Baidu named Xu Sanduo (the character, not the actor) its person of the month in November, based on how many people were searching for him. The actor who plays him, 24-year-old Wang Baoqiang, is on magazine covers, and his personal story has become legend: a village boy who left home at age 8 to study martial arts at the famed Shaolin Temple for six years before venturing to the capital, where he hovered around the Beijing Film Studio, working as an extra and a construction worker. Baoqiang's big break came with the 2003 film "Blind Shaft," in which he plays a hapless teenage coal miner.

"Soldier Sortie" is, incidentally, a valuable promotional tool for China's military at a time when it is combing college campuses in search of well-educated recruits. It could use the image boost; in 1989, Chinese leaders called in the People's Liberation Army to crush demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, and some Chinese say it never regained the public's trust.

To that end, the show might help, but for most viewers, the appeal runs deeper than the military theme. Many say Xu captures a spirit of innocence that seems lacking in China's hypercompetitive markets and workplaces. Few pine for the gray socialist realism of yesteryear, but, as the show's director Kang Honglei puts it, people see something in Xu that they wonder if they have lost.

"I always think," Kang said, "that Xu Sanduo is the most authentic person among hundreds of millions of us."